U.S. SEC chief warns watchdogs need to be limited in tapping crypto's power to snoop

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The federal government could tap into the crypto sector's potential for mass surveillance if not checked by formal policies, said SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, arguing that the industry is — alternatively — also capable of designing systems that screen users for proper illicit-finance protections without jeopardizing their privacy.

"It's no great leap to imagine a steady migration toward a future where the government in a constellation of intermediaries can peer into almost every dimension of the individual's financial lives," Atkins said at a financial surveillance and privacy roundtable hosted at the agency's Washington headquarters on Monday — the sixth crypto-tied roundtable this year.

"While regulators may have a voracious appetite for data, that proclivity is obviously and fundamentally incompatible with the kind of free society that has made America great," he said.

The chairman noted the agency's own longtime wrestling over the so-called consolidated audit trail (CAT) technology meant to monitor U.S. markets with a more immediate snapshot and the post-2008 financial crisis rules that demanded more investment-firm reporting to the SEC.

"Unfortunately, the federal government's insatiable desire for data has expanded these tools in ways that increasingly put the liberty of American investors at risk," Atkins said. And the more recent blockchain technology could be abused as history's "most powerful financial surveillance architecture," he said.

Government policies need to shield the public's lawful financial transactions from "bulk surveillance."

Surveillance and privacy in digital assets has often been more associated with the U.S. Department of Justice prosecutions and the Department of the Treasury, especially its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and its sanctions arm as they seek to combat illicit finance. But the SEC will soon be proposing rules to regulate its corner of the industry.

The SEC under Atkins has sought to race forward to meet the crypto agenda set out by President Donald Trump. His "Project Crypto" has been moving forward on several initiatives, including narrowly defining the realm of crypto securities, seeking standards for tokenization of securities and establishing an "innovation exemption" that allows crypto firms to easily try out new products.

He's routinely spoken of how closely he hopes to work with the SEC's sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on joint oversight of the crypto markets. He advocates a regulated system in which crypto investors can seamlessly handle their business in convenient, one-stop outlets in which the regulatory borders aren't apparent. However, Atkins — unlike predecessor Chairman Gary Gensler — has also argued that most digital assets don't check the securities box and will be out of his agency's reach.

The federal government has for years waged a legal conflict with the crypto space, most notably the developers of such privacy-shielding operations as Tornado Cash. While the regulators appointed by Trump have withdrawn from that fight and said software developers need to be protected, some of those cases have already been resolved with convictions of crypto insiders.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has led the agency's task force on crypto matters, said that "the government should avoid imposing regulatory obligations, including Bank Secrecy Act obligations on a software developer who does not have custody of users assets with the ability to override users choices."

Atkins cautioned about the government's next steps as crypto legislation and rulemaking is underway.

"If the instinct of the government is to treat every wallet like a broker, every piece of software as an exchange, every transaction as a reportable event, and every protocol as a convenient surveillance node," Atkins said, "then the government will transform this ecosystem into a financial panopticon" — a kind of conceptual constant-observation prison conceived by an English philosopher.